Thoughts on martech trends in 2017

Having spent the best part of two decades working on the cutting edge of martech, I spend a chunk of time talking (debating!) about what’s next and what’s hyperbole. Given the downturn in adtech last year and the knock-on effect on martech. Is 2017 going to be a good year?

Well it is no surprise the crowd suggests Artificial Intelligence (AI) as their number one tip this year. The commoditisation of natural language systems and machine learning will no doubt accelerate its adoption though I suspect in reality, a large proportion of the companies suggesting they use AI, are really just rebadging decade old technology. This is not too dissimilar to what happened when all the old tech giants claimed they were in cloud computing and will only help the market over time. But what else?

Content Automation: For the last few years, consolidation has been rife amongst the single channel martech companies?—?the most successful of these now exist within the “marketing cloud” platforms of the big 4 (IBM, Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle). All this has meant the focus has been very much on taking advantage of combining datasets and understanding and acting on user behaviour across channels.

Today though, the major cost for companies is in the time taken to put together the various campaigns. These are increasing quickly as the number of channels increases and agile approaches enter modern marketing teams.

Social and email continue to be a challenge here and this year should see startups expand from being focused not just on managing content but also on using AI to make searching for suitable content (both first party and third party) quick and easy.

Account Based Marketing: To some this is decades old and just B2B marketers reinventing themselves. I disagree and think it will be one of the major growth stories of 2017. The approach is certainly decades old but it has been an expensive way to deliver B2B marketing and only the biggest companies have been able to truly deliver on it. This year should see technology being this to a much wider range of companies through great UX and automation delivering on the promise at much lower acquisition costs.

Predictive Analytics should see some real traction this year?—?though it seems to be a bit like the year of mobile before the iPhone?—?its always this year and never is. Maybe 2017 is the year?

Virtual Reality is on the tip of a lot of marketer’s tongues and whilst I believe it will be huge, I think it will be 2018 or even 2019 before this truly takes off?—?though we might see a few companies do things that result in great PR coverage. There just isn’t enough traction yet in my view. Maybe with Apple supposedly doing something or the devices becoming more price competitive in the run up to Christmas we could see things get going in 2018. Maybe.

Assistants a la Alexa, Cortana etc. have seen the level of take-up that virtual reality was hoping for. It wasn’t Apple, Google or Microsoft driving this but Amazon with its Alexa products. They sold 8.2m units over the Christmas period and 2017 should see many many devices also having Alexa built in. Amazon is doing an excellent job with its marketing post sale so 2017 may well see some enterprising jackass finding a way to deliver marketing content and ruin the experience completely. Hopefully not 🙂

Either way?—?2017 is not going to be a year where marketing technology stands still.